Dialysis

When your kidneys are healthy, they clean your blood. They also make hormones that keep your bones strong and your blood healthy. When your kidneys fail, you need treatment to replace the work your kidneys used to do. Unless you have a kidney transplant, you will need a treatment called dialysis.

Dialysis is a treatment method that replicates the function of the kidneys when they are failing. In healthy individuals, the kidneys work to filter and remove waste products, excess fluid, salts and toxins from the blood.

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Latest Dialysis News and Research

Experience throughout the world, including in Europe, shows that advanced age is the most important risk factor for death in COVID-19: people aged over 70 years are over 10 times more likely to die compared to those aged below 50.

The COVID-19 crisis is not impacting cardiovascular procedures as heavily as it is other therapy areas, since the majority of these procedures are essential, according to GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company. GlobalData estimates that 96.7% of cardiovascular procedures performed in the US are essential procedures.

In complex operations, is there a correlation between the volume of service provided per hospital and the quality of the treatment outcome? This question is addressed in eight commissions on minimum volumes that the Federal Joint Committee has issued to the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care.

While the initial coronavirus peak is starting to pass - in Europe, at least - without the ventilator shortages many feared, the spectre of a second wave or future outbreak means questions of medical rationing still hold sway.

On Day Two of the San Francisco Bay Area's stay-at-home orders in March, Nohemi Jimenez got into her car in San Pablo, California, waved goodbye to her 3-year-old son and drove to her regular Wednesday dialysis appointment.

When researchers from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, used a combination of two specific blood-clotting tests, they found critically ill patients infected with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) who were at high risk for developing renal failure, venous blood clots, and other complications associated with blood clots, such as stroke.

As COVID-19 continues its sweep around the globe, dialysis units have continued to be hotspots for the virus' spread. Researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine hope to combat that threat, through a novel study published May 14, 2020 in JAMA.

A group of tiny RNA that should attack the virus causing COVID-19 when it tries to infect the body are diminished with age and chronic health problems, a decrease that likely helps explain why older individuals and those with preexisting medical conditions are vulnerable populations, investigators report.

Cytokine storms created by COVID-19 are causing major organ destruction and death, and for the first time in the United States, when patients begin to show signs of trouble, physicians are replacing the usual filter in a kidney dialysis machine with a filter known to trap these tiny proteins, with the goal of avoiding the devastation.

When kidney transplants first came into practice in the 1950s, patients with chronic kidney disease could finally picture freedom from the unrelenting routine of blood-cleansing dialysis treatments. Just over a half-century later, demand has completely outstripped supply.

In an effort to rapidly provide specialized care for patients with coronavirus-like symptoms while protecting the safety of health care workers, doctors at Wake Forest Baptist Health created a special respiratory isolation unit from an existing 24-bed medical-surgical unit in the hospital in Winston-Salem.

A device designed at the University of Pittsburgh could help improve outcomes as a treatment for COVID-19 when used in conjunction with non-invasive or mechanical ventilation, and it recently received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

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